Loki's Laughter
by aangst
Summary: For as long as Loki had lived, he had not once cried. For all his life, he had found stupidity hilarious. Even his own. Especially his own. Alt title How Many Times Can I Cram the Word Laugh into 1000 Words. No dialogue. Set while Loki is in jail. AU where Frigga visits him almost every day, with tea.


For as long as Loki had lived, he had not once cried. For all his life, he had found stupidity hilarious. Even his own. Especially his own. As a small child curled up on his bed in the dead of night, no sound but that of his laughter rent the air, filling his spacious chambers with mirth that bubbled off the walls until even tears pricked at the corners of his eyes. More often than not, his mother would sweep into the room, unannounced and uncalled for, and gather him up into her gossamer nightgown and silken arms, cradling his small, quaking form until the laughter began to subside. Always, too, she would light a candle on the nightstand before floating away again like a phantom, leaving nothing of herself but the scent of wild roses and sensation of butterfly kisses on her youngest son's forehead to ward off the darkness until he fell asleep.

Loki always quashed the light the minute she left. But after this, he would no longer laugh. Frigga had ruined the irony of the moment: That a god, son of a god, a prince, son of the king of the gods, would be afraid of a little harmless darkness. How utterly _stupid_.

Now, Loki could look back on those days and laugh again. Because the irony of the situation had been invalid all along. He was no prince, no son of a god, and he had always had every reason to be afraid for his life in his own home. He just hadn't known it. For what king in his right mind would let a frost giant live in his castle?

And Loki could only laugh and laugh, for how _stupid_ Odin had been. Had he thought Loki might never find out his true heritage? Had he believed water thicker than blood? Had he imagined that his adoptive son might _not_ one day turn his back on the only world he had ever known, make war on his foster family and the human race, and attempt to become supreme ruler of the galaxy?

It was all inevitable from the start, and both of them knew it. And Loki could not help but laugh and laugh at the old man's stupidity.

Trapped in his own tiny white cell, Loki hooted and hollered for days on end. Great, heaving wails of mirth boomed about the prison, keeping the inmates up at night. Those across the corridor watched him go mad with blatant revulsion, and his neighbor adjacent sat as far away from him as possible and clapped his scaly, clawed hands resolutely over his earholes.

Whenever Frigga came to visit, nearly every day, her son only laughed harder. She would simply appear inside his cell, without a sound, pull up a table and two chairs, and make tea. While the water boiled, while the leaves steeped, while she poured, she watched Loki with an expression resembling a scratching post: Worn smooth by the ministrations of some animal, so perfectly blank one might never had guessed it had been ravaged cruelly by a set of vicious claws and teeth, which it only sharpened in return.

Only her eyes gave away her true intentions; that unnatural Asgardian blue shimmered and blurred with a clear and obvious plea. Her eyes screamed at her son to get up off the floor, to sit down and take tea as if he had never once left her side, as if the millennia of lying to his face could all be undone with just this one simple token. He almost considered doing it just to humor her; the irony would be positively chilling, him stepping down to her level, reversing their positions for once, both of them knowing his pretenses were thinner than the finest of gossamer robes she still wore after all these years.

But then he laughed and laughed some more because _how stupid could he be._

And then one day, Loki's laughter stopped. One moment, he was rolling on the ground, cheeks burning, lungs popping, and the next, he was still. Curled about himself just like all those thousands of years ago on the smooth white floor, eyes fixed unseeing on the blank far wall, the laughter finally subsided as suddenly as it had begun, weeks ago, when he had last seen his false brother sealing the wards on his fate. The surrounding prisoners looked up, confused. Was the madness truly at an end?

And then he heard it. The gentle, constant, methodical pouring of tea. Without daring to look at his foster mother, Loki slowly, slowly stood up. And as the sound began to taper off, he slowly, slowly raised his head, and turned around.

Frigga's scratching-post mask was as imperceptible as always, but her eyes, her beautiful Asgardian goddess eyes, as usual, betrayed her. And though he would never admit it in a hundred thousand lifetimes, Loki was deeply afraid of what he might find there. But even so, he could look nowhere else.

And so he saw when Frigga's eyes _smiled_.

Within seconds, Loki's cell was a wreck. Green fire exploded in the air around him, scorching the whitewashed walls and causing the force fields to spark and pop. Tables and chairs flipped about the room and flew to pieces against the ceiling. As sparsely as the space was furnished, what little there was to destroy, Loki laid waste to it. Horrendous screams flew unbidden from his throat only to twist back upon themselves and contort their volumes into the crudest, most grotesque form of laughter. The curious inmates about his cell were flung away from him by their own astonishment and fear.

And less than a minute later, after all was said and done, Loki was left only with a grin slashed unnaturally wide across his face, dilated pupils, and a tea set, untouched amid the wreckage, with piping hot fresh tea and the scent of wild roses.


End file.
